I have not written for three weeks because I have been having a baby. It was not the easiest of births; passion and fear rather than a Disney arrival.

I did get to experience all the different types of births that one can have. I got an epidural that worked on one side only. And the joys of lots of pushing followed by a cesarean. The general anesthetic was the cherry on the pie.

There are deeply personal parts that are entwined in this great moment when I became two people. Do I want to throw those parts of me in black and white on to the internet? I am glad I got to write about my chicken, I can hide behind her confliction.

Is motherhood; writing and making art about it; a worthy pursuit? Is it little self indulgent, domestic, and unprofessional? Or is that my paternalistic values degrading my sex?

I do not know what the answer is but I really want to explore my new mothering role. It is not just sweet and cuddly, it is fear and philosophy. His basic needs to be held and fed, warm and secure teach me how to live my life.

Perhaps it was because she was free. She had really long legs, looked a bit like a turkey, with a very small comb and a tentative step in her gate. I had driven out to Riverside County to pick her up.

A nice but strange little man with a deep tan, a old dodge power wagon in his driveway, and a couple of loose chickens happily clucking around his back yard greeted me. His tan colored cat, a skinny thing lying in a strip of sun that streamed down on the verdant grass, was unaware of the deep red chicken pecking at bugs near its head. He spoke only to my protruding pregnant belly the way teenage and drunken boys do to a girls boobs.

I know from experience that there is no graceful way to catch a chicken. And looking as I do, like I swallowed a watermelon whole, I was not about to volunteer. So I watched as the deeply tanned man ran about the yard, mimicking the gawky movements of his prey. He stalked and pounced at the dodgy chicken. Once caught, he held her ever so gently so as to allow her to flap and panic and eventually escape.

Some people just don’t have the knack when it comes to chickens.

Chickens are mean, if they could, they would all vote Republican. It is a cutthroat world in the flock, no home baked cookies when you first move into the neighborhood. We introduced the gawky, funny looking chicken with long legs and a mixture of feathers. She settled in as best she could. She perched awkwardly on the edge of the coop, flying out with a fluster of feathers each time one of the original chickens came in to use the nest for laying. She was unsettled.

But then she found a job. She began to set.

Perhaps there was not much else for her to do, or perhaps she was making a stand against the others bullying her, but she started to sit upon the eggs. She kept a vigil, night and day, venturing out only for brief grabs of food and water, then back to her little nest at the edge of the coop.

A few weeks later, I waddled up to the coop with a chirping brown paper bag. I may not have looked much like the fabled Stork, but I reached in and one by one, deposited one day old baby chicks beneath her. They were the size of two cotton balls stuck together with little tooth pick legs and big black bead eyes. Maybe this was my way of nesting for my own upcoming arrival.

The young chicken looked surprised; she pecked my hand and the chicks as I replaced her eggs with the chirping fluff balls.

I sat nearby that day, working quietly outside and listened from a distance to family that I had created.

She clucked the way a mother chicken does; calling them into the world, to the fallen leaf and the yummy bug beneath it. First one, then another yellow one, and then her sister, bounced up on the lip of the coop. Beeped loudly and hopped over to the hen. It seemed idyllic.

You would never believe such a loud noise can come from such a small and fluffy thing.

Something was going wrong.

The funny looking chicken was not behaving the way a new mom should. Having instinctively called them into the yard, she now went about her daily chicken business and ignored them.

Each time one of the little fuzz balls would venture too close to her, looking up to her as mom to help them, to show them what to do in this big new world, she would strike out and peck at them meanly, sometimes lifting them into the air by the wing like fat fluffy balloons and tossing them away.

I peered over the fence at each of the little guys, now alone in the big yard, chirping with all there might. They were looking for direction and protection. The daily life of the back yard continued to flutter around them. The mourning doves on the bird feeder, the finches in the plumb tree and the screeching hawk in the bright blue sky.

That night the funny looking hen came to roost in her favorite nest, the one that she had sat vigil in for so many days. She callously zoned out the now quieter chirps of her adopted fuzzlings. She sat lazily in her high up nest, her eyes getting droopy and slowly closing. Her babies on the floor of the coop chirped quietly to themselves. They gathered together in a downy huddle. There were now only three of them.

I kicked her out, I pushed the funny looking chicken out of her favorite nest. At first she was just annoyed and after a loud squawk and a little ruffling of feathers, she clucked back into the coop. She jumped right over the huddle on the floor and hopped back into her still warm nest.

So I kicked her out again.

I thought that with the limited capacity of the basic chicken brain, if I restarted the ‘going to bed’ ritual, her instincts would kick in. That she would feel something for the now almost shivering bundle of chicks and do what a mom should.

There was new fresh hay on the floor of the coop, a filled nest resting in the corner and feed and water just inches away. It was a fine home for a new mom on the bottom of the coop.

Half an hour later in the sinking light of the chicks first day, she was asleep again in her high up nest, the chicks quietly shivering on the floor below.

As it was bed time, hopping that we could start the adoption process again, I quietly slipped the fuzz ball chicks under her while the chicken gently snored. I creped away into the night.

The next morning, blue with some haze in the air, a slight cold on the ground and yawning stretching dogs, I poked my head in to see how the chicks’ first night had faired.

Not well.

Some time in the night the funny looking chicken had pecked at the fluff balls, kicked them out of the nest. She wanted nothing to do with them. The downy huddle was down to just two chicks, cuddling together for warmth.

My heart sank. It was just not going to work.

I set up a heat lamp, knowing that this would draw a line through any chance that the remaining chicks would bond with the momma. Knowing that this might keep them safe and warm but that they would now have to stay inside the coop, feed on artificial food, and not go outside and play in the sun dappled, bird filled yard.

By that night we were down to just one chick. I was heartbroken. Not only was the chicken not doing her job, but now I was also unable to keep these little guys safe. The funny looking chicken watched lazily from her nest at the top of the coop; up high were the little one could not follow.

Perhaps just because I was cross with her, I kicked her out again.  Now she was furious at being repeatedly shooed out, her feathers ruffled and purpose in her step she stalked back into the coop.  This time, when she climbed up to her nest, she found a ruddy great big hard cold rock sitting in her place.

A day or two passed. I didn’t see any chicks. Perhaps they were all eaten by hawks, or shivered to death in the night, or were pecked by the other chickens who wanted nothing to do with them.

As an aside, it has been a very busy chicken week. One of the other chickens was not well. She had an infection and despite cleaning and tending to her, she was not showing any signs of getting better. I called my friend, a great old cowboy vet who helped me keep the horses healthy back when I ran the Sunset Ranch.

“I just don’t know anything about chickens, Amy.” I think he may have been a little offended “There are vets that know about this kind of stuff.”

“I know but I just really like her.” I felt rather silly asking him about a lowly chicken. She must have been nearly four years old with a huge, dangling comb,  a wonky broken toe and a clipped beak. I believe she was an escapee from a battery farm.

“What about giving her SMZs?” –a horse antibiotic that I used a lot in the ranch days.

“That might work.” I arrived at his compound the next day to pick up a small handful of the large oval pills, “it sure as hell won’t hurt her,

“my god,” he exclaimed as I waddled up to greet him, “you’re huge!” At this stage in pregnancy I have to lean forward to kiss people on the cheek so as not to bombard them with my greatly protruding belly.

Later that evening, as the sun was getting golden in the sky, my husband ran through the bulging fruit trees trying to catch the sick chicken. Just as he was about to pounce on her, I squealed with delight.

There, at the back of the yard, among the wild lilies and dappled sunshine, was the funny-looking chicken. Following her like a beeping fuzzy yo-yo was the last of the chicks.

The hen had risen to the challenge. She was doing the job that nature had told her to. She had found her mothering instincts and had graduated from a selfish, gawky young chicken, and become a mumma.

I guess I’ll be next.

xxx

Amy Bernays is an artist and writer in Los Angeles, California. She is expecting her first child some time later this week.

“Wait, so let me get this straight, you were born in a tree house, in Hawaii, during a hurricane?”

The big, blue, stuck-on eyelashes fluttered at me,

“Do you think that was the best place for a woman in labor to be?” I asked.

“Well, they were on drugs” she blinked back with a perfectly reasonable explanation. Mimi had just finished telling us all about her self-portraits.

“Well, let’s move on to our next challenge.” The Host burst into the contestants, a bunch of surprisingly attractive artists standing awkwardly in a semi-circle. The six easels and the camera crew were stacked in front of us; holding aloft the selection of Mimi’s painting for this Show-and-Tell segment.

The camera darted to cover the host, followed by the sound man on a leash attached to his head phones. It hovered on the host’s face like a bee to a burger on a hot day.

“Thank you, Mimi, for showing us your next work” the gruff Bulldog of a presenter nailed out to the leering camera, “Next up we have Amy Bernays,” he gestured to his right with the grace of a buffalo.

Mimi tottered around in her high heels collecting perched canvases and setting them in a neat little row in the corner of the room. She bent to stroke her miniature Hairless Crested Chinese excuse for a dog who was loitering at the back of the studio like a teenager’s pompom dangling on the end of a pencil.

Mimi was wearing what my sister calls ‘knock me over and f**k me’ high heels. The bubblegum pink mini dress that she was wearing was exactly the same size and shape as the five other dresses that she wore each time she emerged from the make-up room. It was a feat of textile engineering and some bending of the laws of physics that she didn’t flash her G-string each time she moved.

The PAs removed the five extra easels that I didn’t need for my presentation and I positioned my lone painting of a tree.

“And what do we have here?” the Buffalo asked with his back to me, looking down the barrel of the wafting camera lens.

“That’s a question to you, Amy” the Director piped in,

“Um, It’s a painting of a tree.” (I thought that this was fairly obvious.)

Silence.

Expectant looks from the director, his hands held together in pained prayer, his eyebrows up in his hairline

“It is not pretending to be anything other than a painting of a tree” I continued. “I used to do more literal, more rigidly representational work like Mimi’s lovely paintings of herself, but that is not what I want out of painting. We have cameras or magazines for that and I don’t see that as the aim of painting.

“I found what I admired in other people’s paintings was mood, color, atmosphere, texture. I like it when painting reminds us of a thing or moment when we were happy. When I closed my eyes and followed my heart I was lead in this direction. It is about light and paint and atmosphere, an ideal, freedom. And I love this tree, I love its thick buttery paint, it makes me want to lick the paint right off the canvas.”

“Right. Yeah. Amy, next time, short, snappy sentences. This is TV. OK”

Later that day, in a new dress, Mimi places a beautifully manicured hand on my arm. “You know that I’m not really like this” she said earnestly, “this is TV and I want this show to be picked up so I can be famous … you know, they want us to create drama.”

She teetered over to her easel and perched her barely covered butt cheek on the stool. She kept talking to me as she continued to paint her Marilyn Monroe portrait with the letters HOLLYWOOD printed over the top. “Anything that I said in the personal interview about your art is not meant personally, I love your painting in real life.”

What had she said about my painting?

At that moment the Line Producer called me into the living room. “So this is going to be a gossip scene with your ‘best bud’ Janna.” Janna was sitting on a sofa looking terrified. She had confided in me earlier that day that she too almost didn’t turn up for day two of the taping. We had wanted it to be an inspiring experience; ‘Lets-get-the-world-painting’ kind of show that would creatively engage a nation. Scripted gossiping scenes were not what either of us had signed up for.

“So, if you could say something like, “I hate Mimi, her work is crap,” and then you, Janna, say ‘Isn’t she a stripper!’ that would be great.” He smiled at us for a split second and then, with a look of concern at the shine the lights were leaving on my nose, he yelled, “Can we get make-up in here?”

—

bernays sketch

I am often asked to provide a photo of me. A head shot like the one you can see of me with a friendly goat on the New Blood Art website. Ideally I would have one of me in the studio, brush in hand, canvas at the ready, the flair of creative genius zinging wildly in my unkempt hair.

But the reality is that my studio is less than the cover of Dwell magazine and more like the aftermath of an armed robbery. Also, I have no self portraits. I did a few back in London but they have all been whisked away by my mother for ‘safe Keeping’ and I have no idea where they are.

I want my self portrait to be done while I am pregnant. This may be a transitory state; I look like I swallowed a watermelon; but it is a fitting one for this project. Like the artist in the studio is somehow holding within them the works of art; pregnant with possibilities.

So here’s the plan. To paint a few self portraits and to stage a photo shoot…

Amy Shuckbrugh is a painter friend of mine also in London. She is eloquent and delicate. I wish I could be half as ladylike as her. The funny thing is, in The Muse, a large self portrait attempt, I painted her. Each time looking into my own round and pink face and scribbling away her willowy eyes and petite nose.

Anna Judd is a painter I met while shooting a reality show about artists. It wasn’t this one

She seemed uncertain when I met her; like she was a little scared of the world. Her paintings have stayed with me, wriggling into my thoughts. Her tender tragedy and plastic handling make me want to wipe away her tears.

Clair Alexander is a London based portrait painter whom I really love, She uses blues and purples, colors that infuse the vitality and life into the sitter.

For a while in London I was painting a lot of portraits. I can capture other people. The light around them, their confidence or lethargy, that moment in their character that invites you in through their eyes.

But when it comes to painting me, I can’t help but paint a piggy squiggle. I assure you that I do not have quite such a wide porcine snout, my complexion is not so ruddy and I don’t always look dumbfounded.

I am working with another handicap; I am using acrylic not oil. I love the vibrant colors and lackadaisical dry time of oil, the way it slips gently onto the canvas. It dries clear and the colors are true. Acrylic is chalky, clumsy, fast and uneven to dry. It is like making love with oven mitts on. But it is not toxic will not erode my brain or poison my blood.

This is my first attempt with my new parameters and I am thoroughly unsatisfied; I will have to try again. I promise to keep you posted.

I had paint on my nose and frustration in my hair from several unsuccessful self-portrait attempts. But the brush in my hand was a whip of determination snaking around me. I was going to make something in the studio that day work.

I looked at The End, propped up on its side in the corner. It has been lolling about my studio for a while. Not quite finished. The couple were too pensive. The party in the far away house was too trendy with ridiculous haircuts and uneven walls. The foreground was damp.

I knew exactly what to do. I grabbed the burnt umber and a strip of masking tape. I mixed a domestic terracotta red that would look lovely in my kitchen, a yellow that smelled like wild oats and cooked earth.

All the loose ends of my self portraits frazzled hair, wonky eyes and piggy noses mounted a last invasion. Determination and sear pigheadedness was needed to get to The End.

Now, I could blame the fact that I am pregnant. Or that we have had house guests on rolling rotations for six weeks, or I could make something fabulous up like I was robbed at gun point, but the truth is I don’t know what happened to it. I had had it out of the store room to show someone, just a week ago. I can picture it laying there on the table, or hanging in the office, but they are just memories. I have had to come to that sinking realization that I have lost The Graduate.

It is (was) a little painting, polite and tidy, small like the girl within it. I thought of it a lot and used it as a spring board for a number of other paintings like Camouflage and The Oasis. She is sitting at the edge of the bar; a lone willowy glass of champagne accompanies her. Her long legs, one reaching out for the floor like a swan’s neck, the other tucked up beneath her like a collage student perching on a beanbag. She glances back at us, are we the viewer here for her? Are we going to take her away?

I started this series back in 2006 when my studio was in deepest darkest East London. I had been cycling back from a life drawing class in Hackney. It was raining. Not the normal London rain that flaccidly spatters but thick pregnant raindrops. I was soaked and could feel the trickles from my hair running down the small of back.

I noticed that there was a strip club in the boarded up pub next to the studio block. I was fed up with drawing ugly old men in life drawing and have found, not unsurprisingly, that pictures of pretty women sell better. Drawing in there is not easy, it is dark, the girls move really fast, and sometimes they are up-side-down.

I stalled telling the New Blood Art staff and the client that I had lost the painting. I slept on it, in my dreams looking again in the back rooms of houses in the prairie that I have painted and the bags of my canvas shoppers. I stopped myself when I was looking again in places I had already looked. I made it once; I will just have to make it again.

Unfortunately, it is a painting with many layers with long dry times. But here was my chance to improve on some aspects of it. So here it is, it is not the same one that the client, a very nice man in London, fell in love with; but in some ways I think that it is better. The lines are more confident, the handling a little more controlled, more filled in.

The Graduate has grown up, she has reinvented herself; she is now the Professional.

It starts with the cold, snow covered, lonely sage bush up in the foreground; then the hot and dry slope of the steep desert hillside; finishing with the expanse of floor, bland and gray, with rhyming cold mountains in the distance. The Desert Floor and The Third Wave are fraternal twins; married contemplations of our earth, wet and dry, water and land, sand and sea.

In three separate and distinct portions, The Desert Floor braids together the peculiarities of the desert; the hot and the cold, the desolate and the florid; making strange friends in such a lonely place. That life can eek a living out here, and that it thrives, thrills me.

The desert floor is hot and thick with air and dust. Up the hill, what seems to be only a light walk away until you crumble the dry rock beneath your boots, the air thins to a knife edge. The wind slices at you, I can hear the blue of the snow resting in the shade of a pinion pine.

The Third Wave is a quiet meditation on threes, landscape as philosophy. Thoughts are disguised as moments in time in an open ocean. The different watery sections of the composition: the foreground wave, the middle upcoming one, and the misty horizon, moving and shifting at the edge of its little world: punctuate and give shape to experience.

I want to play with the paint, to show its brush marks and drag lines so that we know the mechanics of its manufacture, that it is a painting, a made thing. Not a photo or machine made product. I want that loose expression of paint to dance with the skill and magic of figurative painting; that skill that we all can know and point to, to look like something.

xxx

This is a continuation of the work I started the other day, I ruminated on the start of things in my post Sand and Sea http://newbloodart.com/blog/sand-and-sea-a-steadfast-plan-for-these-canvases/

I sometimes really like painting commissions. Sure, it’s of a dog. Not exactly high art, but I know that the finished thing will be loved. I am released from the constant art school crit in the back of my mind.

I can settle down and play in a clearly defined pen. The piece should be representational, should be pleasant to look at, and should be of their dog and not someone else’s dog that I just happened to have a better photo of. I like the simplicity of knowing what I have to do.

I have been working in the studio on a painting of a house. It is not for a particular gallery, in fact, it is too big and heavy to ship to the UK so I don’t have a place to show it. I am painting it because I need to; because the house explains something to me.

I am not sure what it will look like in the end, it started out life a different shape. When I am doing this kind of work I am very much out in the wilderness. There is no safe pen to play in.

So painting commissions are like a busman’s holiday. And I rather like dogs. I like animals, particularly the relationship between humans and animals. Well, to those that know me, and that I used to be an animal trainer to TV and film, that is no big surprise. And, in my mind the relationship that we have with animals is not too far from what I am trying to achieve in paintings.

Both involve no linguistic communication. In art, we are telling the audience about something, a relationship that we have once had, a friend we know or a feeling or memory using lines, objects and colors. With animals, sure we use commands. We yell “sit” at the dog when the postman comes or the in-laws are watching. They understand the word as a something more like a bark, not the same way that we humans use words. Not infused with meaning in itself. It is the tone of voice and the stern finger wagging that tell the dog to behave.

So, back in the studio as I keeps scribbling with yellows and blue shadows, with dulcet eyes and wise eyebrows, I bounced around the commission pen like a kid on a go cart. Sticking my arms out with color is my only risk, purple instead of gray; blue instead of black.

It wasn’t helped by the long and late night conversation that I had had the night before with my friend. The pros and cons of landscape, abstract and figure painting had chipped away at my previously steadfast plan for these canvases.

One was to be a bigger version of the third moving horizon; a painting that I love. It is subtle and austere, the kind of thing that you can look at, get lost in. like staring into the depths of the horizon while thinking about a lost love. The reproduction really doesn’t do good service to the subtleties of the original. It leaves out the slight difference in tone and the reflective differences in the paint. The original is down being photographed for a print, so I had to work from memory (not finished yet.)

As I mixed the base paint, I remembered the first time I painted it. It was cold in the studio, as it was now, and I was thinking of sailing in a small boat on a dark and windy day. the dark wave spatter, the inky smell of sea urchins, the cold on my windy cheeks.

The second painting is simple, part of a series I am working on; landscapes from high sierra. Based on a watercolor I did from the back of my car. It was hot and dry on the desert floor. The road up to the cabin is horrifyingly steep, cut into the edge of the mountain. Clinging on to the tumbling rock and sand like the splayed hoofs of a mountain goat. At the top; in the foreground, there is a layer of clean, cold, white snow blanketing a lonely sage bush.

I love the composition. The cold vs the hot and dry, it is so characteristic of the desert mountains. Cut into three parts, with the third the distant valley, yellow and blue, gray but never green.not finished…